


Hypotheticals

by prepare4trouble



Series: Little By Little [49]
Category: Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friendship, Gen, Visually Impaired Ezra Bridger, discussion of random hypothetical scenarios
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-24
Updated: 2019-03-24
Packaged: 2019-12-06 22:01:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,116
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18225965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prepare4trouble/pseuds/prepare4trouble
Summary: Ezra needs help coming up with ideas for jobs he can do on the base. Reluctant to actually ask people for ideas, he goes to Sabine with a hypothetical scenario to talk about instead.





	Hypotheticals

Three quiet taps on the door of Sabine’s quarters interrupted her creative flow mid-spray of her paint can. She finished the line she had been painting, then reluctantly tore her eyes away from her wall and lowered the can. She waited, finger still poised to press the valve. If it was important, they would knock again.

Nothing happened. Five seconds passed. Ten. She took a breath. Twenty seconds, still no second knock. That was long enough. She looked critically at the painting, raised the spray-can and aimed it, then lowered it again.

Whoever it was either didn’t know she was in, in which case they would assume she was somewhere else and waste time trying to find her, or they  _did_  know she was there, and they knew she was ignoring them.

Either way, she was going to have to answer.

With a frustrated sigh, she tossed the spray can onto her bed where it hit another that she had left there earlier. She opened the door.

There was nobody there.

Puzzled, she stepped through and looked left and then right, just in time to see Ezra’s retreating form walking slowly away from her door.

“Ezra?” she called after him.

He froze in place mid-step, then turned slowly. As he did, a nervous grin spread across his face. He raised a hand and brushed it through his hair. “Oh, uh… hey Sabine. How’s it going?”

She frowned. Apparently whatever he had wanted wasn’t urgent then. “Fine,” she told him. A questioning tone slid into the word, but Ezra either didn’t notice, or chose to ignore it.

He rubbed the back of his neck distractedly. “Great,” he said. “So, uh… what’s up?”

Sabine looked him up and down, trying to work out what was happening. He was acting as though he hadn’t just knocked on her door, and meeting her here was a total surprise. There was nobody else around, so it must have been him that knocked. That meant that unless he had decided it would be funny to knock and run — and if so he was incredibly bad at the game because she had given him ample time to flee — he had wanted to talk to her.

“Not much,” she replied. “How about you? Did you need something?”

Ezra looked thoughtful for a moment, like he was mulling over his options. He glanced behind him, in the direction he had been walking when she had stopped him, then to her again. Finally, he made a decision, and strode back toward her. “Mind if I..?” he said, indicating the door to her quarters.

Sabine shrugged and walked back through, Ezra followed her.

As the door closed behind him, he folded his arms and went to lean against the wall. The freshly painted wall, still glistening with wet paint.

“Hey, watch it!” she shouted, anticipating the disaster a fraction of a second before he ruined both her work and his clothing.

He flinched in surprise at the unexpected outburst, but it stopped him. He turned and saw her unfinished art on the wall. “Oh. Sorry.” He looked again, appreciatively this time. “Were you working on this just now?”

“Yeah, trying to,” she said, and winced at the impatience she heard in her own voice. It hadn’t been intentional, and she definitely hadn’t been trying to make him feel unwelcome. “Sorry,” she said quickly. “It’s just, it’s not finished. You know I don’t like people seeing them before they’re done.

“Right.” Ezra averted his gaze from the half-finished design on the wall and continued not to speak.

Sabine folded her arms and gave him a moment to say something. He remained silent.

“Not that it isn’t great to have you here Ezra, but was there anything you needed, or…”

“Yeah, I uh…” He glanced around the room, selected another patch of wall, one that was also painted but long-since dried, and leaned against that instead. There was something awkward about the way he was standing. She couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was, but there was something wrong. He was being too careful; almost as though he was trying to make it look casual. The result — exaggerated nonchalance to the point where it was almost funny — probably wasn’t exactly what he was going for.

She waited.

“So…” he said after a few moments of silence. “Here’s something I was just thinking about.” He adjusted his leaning position to something that looked marginally more comfortable. “What would you do if you couldn’t fight the Empire?”

She blinked. That… wasn’t the question she had been expecting. “If I couldn’t… what do you mean? Like if they defeated us? I’d be dead, Ezra. We all would.”

“No. Like if…” Ezra scrubbed at his face with his fingers and shook his head. “Like if you couldn’t for another reason. If… if all the weapons in the galaxy stopped working or something, so you had to do something else.  _Then_  what would you do?”

This had to have something to do with his sight. She couldn’t figure out exactly  _what_  yet, but it was the only explanation that made any sense. Something to do with him feeling that he couldn’t fight anymore. “You can still fight the Empire, Ezra,” she assured him. “Just give it a little time.”

He tensed noticeably, and she knew that she had been right. Realizing that he had given himself away, he made a visible effort to relax and continued to lean awkwar… casually… against the wall. He waved a hand through the air as though he was brushing away her words.

“Yeah, I know I can,” he told her. “This isn’t about that. I just want to know what you’d do. Just, y’know, out of interest.”

He was lying. And he wasn’t even lying  _well_.

“You want to know what I’d do if all the weapons in the galaxy stopped working?” she asked.

He nodded. “But the Empire is still there, you just can’t fight it.”

Sabine’s mind was already working through the various possible consequences of the hypothetical scenario Ezra had presented her with, and if that was really what he wanted to talk to her about, she had plenty of answers she could give him. She just wasn’t sure how useful they were going to be.

“Okay,” she told him. “First, I  _would_  still be able to fight them; I don’t need weapons to fight. Especially if the other side isn’t armed either. I’m assuming ‘all the weapons in the galaxy’, means the Empire doesn’t have any either, right?”

Ezra frowned. “Oh. Yeah, I guess not.”

“If the Empire didn’t have weapons, they wouldn’t be much of a problem anymore. The only reason they manage to hold onto power is that they have the firepower to keep people in line. Take away their weapons and we win, whether we’re armed or not.”

“They still have Stormtroopers and Inquisitors, and… other things.” He shivered slightly, almost imperceptibly, at whatever thought or memory had struck him.

“We have powerful people too,” she told him. “Come on, what’s this really about, Ezra?”

He shrugged. “Nothing. Just making conversation. Humor me, okay?”

She  _was_  humoring him. But if he wanted to keep going with this, she had more. “Fine. If nobody had any weapons, the Rebellion would actually have more chance of beating the Empire,” she said. “Plenty of people are trained in hand-to-hand combat, and I don’t just mean Mandalorians. Plus I bet most Stormtroopers  _don’t_  get that kind of training, because the first thing the Empire does is stuff their recruits into bulky armor and hand them a blaster.”

Ezra nodded. “True, I guess.”

“Defections from the Empire would probably go up too,” she said.

“Yeah, that makes sense. People don’t leave because they’re worried about what the Empire will do to them and their families.”

Taking away the Empire’s weapons wouldn’t neutralize the threat, of course, but it would make it easier to get people out before the Empire got to them. “All this adds up to a weaker Empire. Forget not being able to fight them, we’d probably defeat them by the end of the month.”

“Okay.” Ezra shifted his weight to the other foot, still leaning against the wall, but standing much more normally now, like he had forgotten about his attempt at nonchalance. “You seem to have a weirdly huge number of ideas about this. Have you thought about it before?”

She shook her head. They had occasionally done thought exercises like this when she had been at the Academy, but the themes had been vastly different. “Nope,” she told him. “I’m just smart. Oh, and ‘weapons’ doesn’t just mean blasters and lightsabers. Even if they did all stop working, there’d be nothing to stop people reverting to swords or bows and arrows. Even a tree branch or something could be a weapon if you knew how to use it. Which I do, by the way.”

Ezra frowned thoughtfully. He stepped away from the wall, hesitated, then leaned again. “Okay all good points. But what I meant was more like what would  _you_ …” he paused. “Okay, try this instead. The weapons stop working, everyone rises up and we kick the Empire’s butts out into Wild Space or something. They’re not a threat anymore. What would you do  _then_? Just around the base.”

“So… in peacetime?”

He nodded.

What he was really asking was what she would be doing with herself if she was in his position. Not necessarily  _exactly_  his position, but unable to contribute to the war effort, however temporarily. He didn’t need to think about that. He was going to be back on duty before he knew it.

“You do realize that if we defeated the Empire we wouldn’t need a base anymore, don’t you?”

He pressed his lips together. “Sabine…” he said. There was an almost pleading note in his voice that she didn’t like.

She wanted to help, but she didn’t have an answer for him. Not one that he would be able to use, anyway. What she might to if and when they won the fight against the Empire was not relevant to his situation now. She hesitated, torn between answering his question honestly; what would she do if the war was over, and answering the question he was really asking; what should he do, now?

“We wouldn’t be on the base,” she said. “We’d be back on the Ghost, doing what we always used to do before we were here, minus attacks on the Empire. But if I  _did_  end up staying here, I guess I’d have more free time, so I’d be able to work on my art. It’d be a good idea to work on my hand-to-hand skills too, I guess. I mean, I’m good, but if the weapons aren’t working and can’t be fixed, I’d want to be the best I could. Just because there’s no Empire and no weapons doesn’t mean there won’t be people who want to fight.”

“I guess,” Ezra said. He looked agitated. What she was saying wasn’t helping him. Of course, she still wasn’t clear on exactly what he wanted help  _with_.

“What about you?” she asked. “What would you do?”

He shrugged and this time slumped rather than leaned against the wall, no longer looking awkward but simply defeated. “I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“Ezra…” she began, but stopped. That was honesty at last, but she didn’t know what to do with it. She didn’t know what he  _needed_  from her. Nothing about this conversation made any sense; it was like she was missing a piece of a puzzle, some vital piece of information that would make everything click into place. Why was Ezra suddenly talking, however cryptically, about doing something other than his usual role within the Rebellion?

“Has someone said something to you?” she asked.

People had said things about Kanan.

In the months that followed Kanan and Ezra’s return from Malachor, it had taken time for Kanan to recover and to learn the skills he had needed — skills that he was now trying to pass on to Ezra. For months, he had been distant as he had tried and failed to cope with the sudden and permanent loss of his sight. This time had coincided with their first few months on the base, getting things up and running, and beginning to bring in new people. People that they didn’t know, and that didn’t know them.

Some of those people had had opinions about someone living on the base, but not appearing to contribute to the fight. Some of  _those_  people had been stupid enough to voice those opinions where Sabine could hear them.

They had only made that mistake once.

Ezra hadn’t answered her question. If anybody had said anything like that to him, she was going to hurt them.

“Ezra,” she said, more firmly this time. “Has anyone said anything? Anything like they sai…” She hesitated. She didn’t know whether Ezra knew about that, and if he didn’t, she didn’t want to bring it up. Especially not now.

“Like they said about Kanan?” Ezra shook his head. “No.”

So he knew. She wished he didn’t.

“ _I’m_  the one that said something,” he continued. “To Hera, I mean. She agreed with me — well, she kind of agreed with me — but that’s all that happened.” He paused and his lips twitched into a hint of a smile. “Please don’t punch anybody.”

It was only then that Sabine realized her hands were clenched into fists. With effort, she relaxed them and lay them flat on the table in front of her. “What do you mean? What did you say to Hera?”

He folded his arms tightly. “You knew then,” he said instead of a reply. “About Kanan; what people were saying?”

Sabine winced. New people had been arriving daily back then. They were people who weren’t a part of the family, people who had never seen Kanan in action. People who knew him only as a blind man that the Rebellion was supporting; someone who even after he was as recovered as he was going to get, persisted in spending his days in quiet meditation. That didn’t excuse what she had overheard someone say.

“It only happened once when I was around,” she said. “They learned not to say it again.”

Ezra gave another small smile. “Same,” he told her. 

“You’re  _sure_  nobody said anything to you?” she asked.

“I’m sure, Sabine. But if they had, I could deal with it myself.”

Of course he could. Whether or not he  _would_  was another question. Ezra was more than capable of looking after himself, but he was also fragile when it came to the issue of his sight. He seemed to have been doing marginally better recently, but an overheard comment like that could easily set him back.

“So what’s going on then?” she asked. “Really?”

“Nothing.”

She glared at him. If he thought he was going to get away with that…

Ezra sighed deeply and tore his eyes away from the painting on the wall. He crossed the room in a few steps and sat down opposite her. “I mean it,” he said. “ _Literally_  nothing. I’m bored. I need something to do.”

She could understand that. She had been feeling it herself. It had been weeks since her last off-world mission, and she was itching for something interesting to do. It had to be so much worse for Ezra, because he didn’t have the next mission to look forward to. Until Hera and Sato approved him for duty again, he was essentially trapped here with nothing to do but think about, and plan for, the future.

Forget being bored; that would be enough to drive someone crazy.

“So you asked Hera for a job,” she said.

He nodded. “I asked to go on the general duty roster.”

Sabine winced at the idea. “Really? You want to do droid work?”

“It’s not droi… well okay, it is on  _some_  worlds, but we don’t have a droid for every job so around here it’s people work.”

Okay, he had a point there. “But I thought you wanted to be  _less_  bored, not more. You really think spending your days picking up trash is going to make things better?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much what Hera said too. I mean, she didn’t put it like that, but she thinks I should pick a real job.”

“Good.”

Ezra didn’t respond.

“Isn’t it?”

He shrugged, not meeting her eyes. “Sure. I guess. She wants me to think of something I can do.”

And suddenly the conversation earlier made a lot more sense. “And you’re trying to get ideas by asking people what they’d do. You’d probably have better luck if you asked them what they think  _you_  should do.”

“Yeah, I figured that from your spectacularly unhelpful answers,” Ezra said with an eye roll.

She shrugged. “Hey, you asked a question, I answered it. But now you’ve asked another question, so let’s try to figure out an answer to that one too, huh? What do you like doing?”

Ezra hesitated. “It’s not as simple as that.”

Sabine waited for him to elaborate on that, but he didn’t say anything else. She sighed. “Ezra, if you want me to help, you’re going to have to…”

“It needs to be something I can keep doing,” he interrupted before she could finish.

She frowned. She wasn’t sure exactly what he meant by that — whether he needed to pick something that he would be able to continue doing rather than constantly changing his mind, or whether Hera was hoping that whatever he picked would still be useful to him after he was back on duty — but she could tell that the idea was bothering him. She didn’t understand why. It made sense that he should pick something that he could stick with, rather than odd jobs that would change every day. He needed something that he could concentrate on, get good at. Maybe even something that he would enjoy doing until he was ready to go back to his real job.

“Okay,” she said. “So definitely something you think you’d enjoy, then.”

Ezra shook his head. “You don’t  _get_  it. She want me to think of something I’ll still be able to do when…” he paused. “You know.”

“Oh.” She didn’t know what to say to that. It made sense, she supposed. But for some reason it had never even occurred to her that his sight might be a consideration. “Right. Okay.”

“But I don’t know what I’ll be able to do then,” Ezra said. “I’m still learning how to do stuff, and right now it’s all just walking around and… normal stuff, you know? Nothing specific to some job I haven’t even thought of yet. And because I don’t know what job to pick, it’s not like I can even get an idea of what I’ll be able to do from Kanan. And anyway, if I could do everything Kanan can do, I’d be back on active duty and this whole thing’d be irrelevant.”

He had a point.

“So she wants me to have a backup job, in case I’m never good enough to go on missions again.”

“That’s not it.” Sabine shook her head. Hera wouldn’t do that.

He shrugged. “She said I could go on the general duty roster if I really wanted, but she thought something else would be better. And she said ‘alternate role’, Sabine. What  _else_  could she mean by that?”

“She  _didn’t_  mean it like that. She just wants you to think about something you’d be good at doing. She probably doesn’t want you changing your mind every five minutes. She might have phrased it wrong, but there’s no way she meant it like that.”

Ezra seemed to relax a little, convinced by Sabine’s certainty. “Maybe you’re right. But…” he hesitated and looked away from her again. “I’m not picking up what Kanan’s teaching me quickly enough. It’s hard. But it’s not like the other Force stuff, I can’t figure it out in own time because whether I learn it or not, I’m still going blind at the same speed.”

Sabine wasn’t sure she had ever heard him say it like that before. He had hesitated before he spoke, but once he had started, there had been no attempt to dodge the subject, it was simply a statement of fact. She bit her lip. “I’m sure you’re learning it just fine. It took Kanan time too.”

“Kanan had to figure it out for himself.” His hand moved to something attached to his belt, something she hadn’t noticed before. A folded white object. His fingers rested there for a few moments before moving away again. She wasn’t sure what it was, but it was obviously significant somehow. He shrugged, “But I guess he got more practice; he didn’t get to stop after the lesson finished.”

Sabine took a deep breath. “So what are you going to do?” she asked.

“Practice more, I guess. But covering my eyes up isn’t exactly how I want to spend my last few years of usable vision.”

There was more honesty coming from him in this conversation than the last few months combined, which was why she was reluctant to tell him that hadn’t been what she had meant. She had been asking whether he would opt for the duty roster, or a specific roll. He did bring her to another point though. “Do you even have the  _time_  to be starting a new job? I mean, if you need to study, shouldn’t you be spending your time doing that?”

He couldn’t study with Kanan all day, of course, but he was right, he could practice for himself. He could go over the things they had done in his lessons, come up with exercises that he could repeat until he got them right. It was how she had learned when she had been at the Academy. Lessons with a tutor, followed by study by herself. There hadn’t been time to learn how to do some random job, there had been more important uses for her time.

“I  _am_  concentrating on that,” he said. “I just want to do something else too. It’s not going to be all the time, just enough that my whole life isn’t about my stupid eyes.”

Only, it was. Even putting aside the fact that it must be impossible to forget because he could see the damage everywhere he looked, Hera was making him consider his sight in whatever roll he chose to take on around the base. It made sense from one point of view; if he was going to train in a new job it would be a waste of time to pick one he would be unable to do in a year’s time. On the other hand, whether he could do the job without his sight should be irrelevant because by the time he was blind, he would have all the skills he needed to be a full member of the team again, just like Kanan did.

She hoped.

What he said made sense though; she could understand him wanting a break. She could understand him not wanting to spend every waking moment between now and the day his eyes completely failed him thinking about and practicing for the future. Even though the more time he spent doing exactly that, the faster things would be able to go back to normal.

Some semblance of normal, anyway.

She nodded, then tried to make her question clearer. “So, what’s it going to be; duty roster or real job?”

Ezra shook his head. “Still trying to decide. I guess you’re right though; if I want to not be bored, I’d be better off doing something not boring. So if you have any suggestions, let me know.”

She considered it, but nothing sprung instantly to mind. It wasn’t just trying to think of something that Ezra would want to do, but something that he would still be able to do without his sight. She couldn’t think of anything. It didn’t help that she had no idea what he would be capable of then.

“Yeah, exactly,” Ezra said in response to her silence.

She swallowed. She wanted to help, if only because he had come to her, but she wasn’t sure  _why_  he had picked her when there were people better qualified to advise him. “I’m not the best person to ask about this. Kanan will have a better idea of what you’ll be able to do. And if it was Hera’s idea, she probably has something in mind that you could do.”

“I know,” Ezra told her. “I’m supposed to talk to both of them tomorrow, and Hera already said they’d help if I couldn’t think of anything.”

“Then why…”

“But what if she suggests something I don’t want to do?”

Sabine frowned. “You say no,” she told him.”

“Well, yeah. But I have to do  _something_ , so if I’m going to say no to a suggestion, it’d be better to have another one instead.”

He didn’t really ‘have to’ do anything. Not if this whole thing had been his idea. But he was right, if he wanted something to do, turning down suggestions without any alternative probably wasn’t the best plan. “Okay,” she said. “So let’s think it over. What do you like doing?”

“Getting one over on the Empire,” Ezra said. “Undercover work. Piloting…”

Not exactly helpful, and Ezra knew it. “Anything else?”

“I don’t know, Sabine. I’ve never  _done_  anything else. Back on Lothal all I did was try to survive, and if I could hurt the Empire a little bit while I did it, great, even better. Then I met you guys, and we’re all still trying to survive, only there’s so much more at stake now than my own life. Other than that, the only difference between then and now is I know how to use the Force now. I don’t  _know_  what else I like doing.”

She stared at him. She could understand his point, but he was wrong. He had done more than simply fight the Empire and learn about the Force since joining up with the Ghost crew. “You like the dokma races,” she said.

“Uh,” Ezra frowned at her. “So you think I should become a professional gambler? I dunno, I’m pretty terrible at it. And all we do is gamble for ration bars and helmets anyway, so I couldn’t exactly make a career out of it.”

As much as she loved Ezra, there were times that she wanted to slap him. “Funny. Okay, yeah, that wasn’t the best example, but my point is that you  _have_  done other things. Think of some of them.”

Ezra rested his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands. “He smirked. “You know, the whole point of asking you was so I  _didn’t_  have to think of something for myself.”

“Yeah, and you were  _so_  subtle with your whole ‘let’s pretend’ scenario. How _ever_  did I figure it out?” She threw in an exaggerated eye roll to make sure he picked up on the sarcasm, and he grinned but at least had the decency to look a little embarrassed. “There must be something you’ve done before that you enjoy.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know about ‘enjoy’, but like I said to Hobbie, I’m pretty good at pickpocketing and lock picking. Can’t think of any use for it around here though.”

Neither could Sabine, pickpocketing was definitely something he should be able to do without looking. She was no expert, but she knew that one of the tricks of that particular trade was misdirection, and that didn’t work if you were staring at your victim’s pocket while you stole his wallet. If Ezra already had that skill, maybe there were other ways to use it that might help him in other jobs.

She smiled, “You know, pickpocketing might not be much use, but lock picking  _might_  come in handy. When someone gets locked out of their quarters you’d be able to help them get back in.”

“Great. That’s something I could do maybe once a year.”

“I think you’re underestimating the ability of drunken idiots to forget their access codes after a night at the races,” Sabine told him. “It happens at least once a month. Probably more.”

“Still not exactly a stable career choice.”

True. But he wasn’t looking for a career, just something he could do until he was approved for duty again. She hadn’t really been serious anyway, although there had been a few times she had heard of people forgetting passcodes and finding themselves locked out of their room.

“What kind of locks can you pick? Digital, or ones with a key?”

He shrugged. “Both, I guess. Why?”

“Because you’d have to pick a key lock by touch, you can’t see inside the keyhole. I’m just thinking that’s a skill you might be able to use elsewhere. Digital locks are about bypassing the lock, you use the wiring, right?”

“Sometimes.”

“So that’s a transferable skill too. If you know how to short circuit a lock, maybe you’d be good at fixing them too.”

Ezra frowned. “Fixing locks? A bit specific, isn’t it?”

She shook her head. “Not just locks; fixing  _stuff_. You know, maintenance. I mean, you’d need some training, but you know a lot of it already, we all did a bit on the Ghost. You could probably decide if you wanted to concentrate on what you already know or learn more, and it’ll be different things every day, so it won’t get boring. Plus if you do pick up more skills, it’ll be useful on the Ghost in the future.”

He appeared to mull it over, his expression thoughtful. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’d be fine for now, but not when my sight gets worse.”

“How do you know?” Sabine asked him. “Have you ever tried to repair something without looking?”

“Uh, no. Of course not.”

Sabine grinned triumphantly. “Well then, how do you know you can’t do it?”

Ezra stared at her for a moment, then shook his head. “Because it’s obvious.”

“If you say so.” In fairness, she hadn’t tried it either, but depending on  _what_  she was repairing, she figured she might have a chance. “So what if we were in space, on the Ghost, and the lights went out. How would we repair that?”

Ezra appeared to consider it for a moment, then shook his head. “Nice try. We’d just get a flashlight.”

That was true. “Okay, what if all the flashlights had stopped working too? Chopper’s light included, before you say that.”

Ezra stared at her in confusion for a moment, then shook his head. “Why would all the flashlights stop working?”

“I dunno, same reason the lights did. What would you do then?”

He shook his head. “This is never going to happen.”

“It’s more likely than your weapons scenario,” Sabine told him.

Ezra shrugged. “Okay, that’s fair, but…”

“Think about it,” she interrupted. “What would you do?”

He sighed. “I don’t know. I guess I’d try to figure it out, but I have no idea how. Even working out what’s wrong would be difficult, and I’m pretty sure one wire feels the same as another. Also, I’m no expert, but even  _I_  know it’s not a great idea to stick your fingers into faulty wiring without looking.”

“Fine. So maybe it’s nothing to do with the wiring. But whatever it is, I bet we could come up with some way around it.”

Maybe they could use the tactile alphabet. They could label things before he needed them, then when he  _did_  need them, he would be able to identify them. But that would require him to  _learn_  the tactile alphabet, and she didn’t want to push, not if he wasn’t ready. She was still convinced that he would see the benefit one day, but today was not going to be that day.

Ezra shrugged again, looking unconvinced. “Yeah, I guess we could.”

He wasn’t going to do it. She understood why. He was right, maintenance would be fine for now, but difficult later. And in her ‘lights going out’ scenario, there would come a time when he wouldn’t even be able to tell whether his repairs had been successful. That thought provoked a deep sorrow in her and she tried to push it out of her mind.

“Sabine?” She noticed that Ezra was looking at her, his eyes full of concern. Either the emotion she was feeling was written plainly on her face, or he was picking up on it through the Force. Suddenly she felt very exposed.

She shook her head quickly. He was going to be fine. Whatever job he ended up choosing, he wouldn’t be doing it for very long, because he was going to be back on active duty before he knew it. She had watched him pick up everything Kanan had taught him so far. There was no reason for this to be any different. Right? “Okay, not maintenance,” she agreed.

Ezra shrugged. “It’s not a  _bad_  idea, he said. “It’s just, I need something more simple. Maintenance can be fiddly, so can mechanics. And yeah, maybe I could learn how to differentiate things by touch, but what if I couldn’t? Or if I made a mistake, and instead of fixing something I made it worse? We’re in a war. I mean, reliable equipment is kinda important.”

“So you want to do maintenance with big objects instead of fiddly wires?”

He shrugged. “I don’t think that’s a thing.”

It could be a thing. There was no reason he couldn’t be given certain kinds of maintenance jobs, but he probably didn’t want special treatment. Although, there were specialists within every department, so there was no reason why being given specific types of jobs would be a bad thing.

She decided not to mention it. Not yet. Later, if he was still struggling for ideas, she could bring it up again. “You could help out with construction,” she suggested instead. “We’re building a new barracks at the north side of the base, I bet the team could use the help. You wouldn’t have to worry about the long-term since it’s only one project.”

He looked thoughtful for a moment. Not like he was thinking about it, more like he was trying to find fault with it. There were certainly faults to find. It wasn’t exactly what he was looking for, but then as far as Sabine could tell, he didn’t know  _what_  he was looking for.

“That might actually work,” he said after a few moments. He hesitated. “I mean, the Force is great for heavy lifting.”

That was another point, one that she hadn’t considered. Ezra would have an advantage that would make him a sought-after member of the team.

“As long as Hera doesn’t mind that it’s temporary, that is,” he added.

The way he had told it, this whole thing had been his idea, so Sabine couldn’t imagine why she would mind. She shrugged. “It’s still something you’d be  _able_  to do in the future,” she said. Just because it’s only one project now doesn’t mean there won’t be something else to build in a few months time. If you still need another job by then, that is.”

“Yeah,” Ezra said. He nodded, appearing more enthusiastic about the idea now. “Yeah, that’s true…” he smiled. “Hey, if nothing else, it’s something I can suggest instead when Hera tries to convince me it’s a great idea to work doing inventory for AP-5.”

“Why would she…” Sabine shook her head. It was probably a joke. That was the  _last_  thing he would be able to do when he couldn’t see. Making lists of inventory, reading, writing, checking things off. She wasn’t even sure Ezra would be able to do it now. “Yeah,” she said. “True.”

Ezra got to his feet. “I gotta go, I was supposed to meet Kanan for a lesson about five minutes ago. I’ll let you get on with your painting.” He headed for the door, stopped, then turned back to face her. “Thanks, Sabine,” he said. “Really.”

She shrugged, she wasn’t sure whether she had actually been of any help, but at least she would be able to keep thinking of suggestions for him. “Any time,” she told him.

Ezra opened the door and sped out into the hall. The sound of his running footsteps echoed through.

Sabine sighed, got up, and reached for her spray paint.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments feed the writer!


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